Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  “I’ll put the dogs away,” I told Oscar Fisch. When I’d shut them in my bedroom, I took Oscar’s overcoat, hung it up, invited him to take a seat in the living room, and offered coffee. The couch being the only place to sit, that’s where he sat, but he refused the coffee. I brought a chair from the kitchen and joined him. Now that the dogs were locked up, his color had returned. His almost complete baldness somehow added to the vigor of his appearance. The trousers of his pin-striped three-piece suit were tight over the knees; he wasn’t the kind of man who took care to preserve the creases.

  “I am here,” he began, “to appeal to your good nature.”

  “I have none other.”

  “Let me speak frankly.” He reminded me of tapes of Richard Nixon: Next he’d want to make one thing perfectly clear.

  “Do,” I said.

  “Without meaning to, you have been harassing my wife.”

  After mulling over the disappearance of all those copies of Randall Carey’s book, I’d certainly felt like harassing Claudia. According to Brat, her mother had “about a hundred” copies of Mass. Mayhem. “If I’ve been harassing her,” I said, “it has been entirely unintended. When I met both of you at Marsha’s bat mitzvah, Claudia seemed more than willing to tell me about Jack Andrews’s murder. I never intended to do anything except take her up on what felt like an invitation.”

  And that’s when Oscar leaned forward and, in low, confiding tones, said, “Claudia’s child is in pain.”

  Bronwyn was in her late twenties. Gareth must now have been about thirty-four. Neither was my idea of a child. Could Claudia and Oscar possibly have had a baby? Had I grossly overestimated Claudia’s age? If not, the couple might still have adopted. In that case, though, why was he referring to the little one only as Claudia’s? Could she have had a husband between Jack and Oscar? “I’m very sorry,” I said, envisioning a toddler hospitalized with some cruel illness. “How old is the child?”

  “Hers is only four,” he reported. Brightening, he added, “Mine is about nine.”

  About? I wanted to ask. Your own child, and you don’t know?

  Before I said anything, Oscar went on. With a rueful little shake of his head and a knowing look, he said, “Conflict there! Happens in all couples when there’s an age discrepancy between one partner’s child and the other’s.”

  As I’d now worked it out, after Jack’s murder, Claudia had remarried, produced or adopted a third child, and then either been divorced and granted custody or again been widowed. When she’d married Oscar, he, too, must have been a parent.

  “Well,” I said, “with dogs, a big age difference can work either way. Sometimes the older ones simply can’t accept the little ones, but sometimes they’re really rejuvenated, or they get very maternal.”

  Oscar’s face took on a look of amazement. His whole muscular body seemed to surge with energy. “Why, that’s astonishing!” he exclaimed. “Dogs, too?”

  “In terms of their emotional lives,” I informed him, “they’re very much like people. They’re social animals. They have attachments, rivalries, love . . . everything.”

  “But children? How would one ever know?”

  As a professional dog writer, I am an expert on the general public’s boundless, staggering ignorance about dogs. Moreover, I’d often noticed that many people who knew absolutely nothing about dogs were highly educated types who knew a lot about everything else and consequently assumed that they knew a lot about dogs, too. But how on earth could Oscar fail to realize that dogs had puppies?

  “Well,” I said, “by observation, I suppose.”

  “I’ll have to tell our group about this,” Oscar said. Once again sharp and rather grim, he said, “The group brings me back to the point of this visit.” Responding to what must have been my baffled expression, he added, “Claudia and I are both recovering.”

  That’s when I finally caught on. The child of Claudia’s he’d said was in pain was not Bronwyn, not Gareth, not the third child I’d imagined. All along, Oscar had meant only the inner child.

  Claudia, Oscar informed me, had been the victim of what he called “financial abuse” at the hands of the late Jack Andrews. Jack wrote checks on the couple’s joint account, failed to record them, and blamed Claudia when the checks were returned. Claudia now understood, Oscar reported, that in struggling to make ends meet, she’d been an enabler. Bronwyn and Gareth, Oscar claimed, had been raised in an atmosphere of constant insecurity. “Never knew from one semester to the next whether they’d be pulled out of Avon Hill.”

  Heavens! If the trend continued, we’d soon have recovery groups for people who’d been traumatized by having to attend public school.

  “Jack Andrews enjoyed the good life,” Oscar went on. “Drained the family purse traveling to promote those guidebooks.” Oscar’s tone made Jack sound like a purveyor of pornography.

  And wherever Jack went, I thought, there just so happened to be a dog show.

  “The fact is,” Oscar continued, “nil nisi bonum aside, if Jack Andrews hadn’t died when he did, things would have been even worse than they already were. His insurance was the only thing that got that family through—his insurance and Claudia’s spunk.”

  “The picture you’re presenting,” I remarked, “is quite different from the impression I had.”

  The bald head and heavy shoulders gave Oscar a bullish appearance. In an accusatory tone, he said, “There is no need for anyone to turn that son of a bitch into some kind of local hero.”

  “I have no such intention.”

  “Destructive excuse for a human being! Look at what’s happened to Bronwyn! Christ, look at Gareth!”

  “I’ve met Bronwyn.” I felt guilty about using a name other than the one Brat preferred. “I liked her. I’ve never met Gareth. I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Go to the Square. That’s where he lives. Refuses to take his medication. Hangs around the rubbish bins foraging like a wild animal.”

  If I wanted to see Jack Andrews’s true legacy, Oscar declared, all I had to do was take a look at Gareth.

  CHAPTER 14

  My dog training club meets on Thursday nights in the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Avenue right by the Fresh Pond traffic circle, not far from my house. One subzero Thursday last winter, we’d arrived to find the far end of the hall, where the advanced class meets, cordoned off and occupied by homeless mothers and children taking shelter from the cold. The floor space where we usually spread our mats and set up our jumps was lined with rows of folding cots. As we trained our dogs in the front half of the hall, the women and children sat on these flimsy beds, which weren’t even their own, to wait until we’d left so that they could go to sleep.

  The true contrast between the haves and have-nots would have been far greater at a fancy tennis club, a new-car dealership, or an expensive restaurant than it was at the shabby armory. What made it poignant was the simultaneous presence of the dogs and the children. The next day, my dog-training friend Hope Wilson started to volunteer at a soup kitchen located in the basement of a church in Harvard Square.

  On Wednesday morning, I called Hope to ask whether she knew anything about a man named Gareth Andrews. Before I’d even said that he was Caucasian and must be in his mid-thirties, Hope interrupted me. “Oh, Lord, Gareth! Yes, everyone knows Gareth. You’ve probably seen him in the Square. He always wears an aqua backpack. You see him at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Bow Street.”

  “What does he look like?” I asked.

  “Tallish. These days, he’s wearing a purple parka. On his good days, he has on earmuffs. On his bad days, he doesn’t, because he thinks that’s where the voices come from. On his really bad days, he doesn’t even need the earmuffs: The voices come from the fillings in his teeth.”

  I wanted to consult Rita, but she was at her office seeing patients. To me, Gareth’s evidently severe disturbance sounded far worse than what you’d expect from a childhood trauma that consisted of the fear of havin
g to leave private school. Maybe it was the result of growing up in what sounded like a miserable family. Claudia and Jack, I believed, really had fought about money and about the dog, Chip. Rita would undoubtedly say that those topics were stand-ins for underlying issues of love and control. Brat had memorialized her father by becoming, in one person, both Daddy and Daddy’s little girl. Gareth had been Claudia’s son. In the family photo, he’d looked as if he were trying to bolt. When Jack was murdered, Brat had been eleven, she’d told me, and Gareth sixteen. A father’s murder would obviously have a powerful impact on any child. I wondered whether Gareth’s evident madness could have anything to do with knowledge, spoken or unspoken, of his father’s death.

  Although a few homeless people share Harvard Square with their dogs, most street people back away from Rowdy and Kimi. The alarm in those people’s eyes doesn’t look irrational; it looks like the kind of fear that’s based on reality. The genuine need to be wary of big dogs always saddens me. The partnership between people and dogs goes back tens of thousands of years. Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris evolved together. To sever the bond with dogs is, I think, to lose humanity. All this is to explain that when I went searching for Gareth Andrews, I left Rowdy and Kimi at home.

  Empty parking spaces in Harvard Square being almost nonexistent, I took a chance in driving, but the wind was ferocious, and the sky was spitting rain. I lucked into a spot on Mass. Ave., as it’s called—Massachusetts Avenue—just around the corner from Quincy Street and opposite Bow Street. One high brick wall of Harvard Yard runs between Quincy and the Square itself. On the opposite side of Mass. Ave. are dozens of businesses that cater to students: clothing shops, a bookstore, an ice cream place, and restaurants, including one that’s reputed to house a brothel upstairs. Maybe the rumor is just one of those urban legends, like the story about giant albino alligators in the sewers of New York. (There really aren’t any, are there?) Anyway, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the only streetwalkers were jaywalking students bearing armloads of books and notebooks both ways across Mass. Ave. After nearly getting hit by a car, I made it across, checked out the area where Gareth Andrews was supposed to hang out, and saw no one with a purple parka and an aqua backpack. To escape the cold, I went into the Harvard Book Store. There I hunted around downstairs among the used history books for anything that might have to do with Hannah Duston, but didn’t find her in any of the indexes I checked. Out of curiosity, I looked for Mass. Mayhem. It wasn’t there.

  After a while, I went back outside, wandered around the Square, fought the wind along Mount Auburn Street, and eventually wound my way back to my car to feed the meter. Wishing that I’d called Leah to arrange to meet her for lunch, I again crossed Mass. Ave. and went alone to Bartley’s Burger Cottage, where I battled the miasma of steamy heat and sizzling hamburgers, and ordered and ate a tuna sandwich made the way tuna’s supposed to be: dripping with mayonnaise. Then I left Bartley’s and again checked the corner of Mass. Ave. and Bow Street.

  Right on the corner, just a few steps from the ice cream store and a few doors down from Bartley’s, was a big trash barrel. Bending into it was a man in a purple parka. He didn’t wear the small aqua daypack I’d somehow imagined, but an internal-frame backpack, its numerous compartments neatly fastened. Lashed to the bottom of the pack was a compact bedroll. With bare hands, the man was frantically and ferociously stuffing his mouth with soggy ice cream cones, discarded french fries, and hunks of half-eaten burgers. So rapidly did he shovel the remains of other people’s lunches from the trash barrel to his mouth that he couldn’t possibly have examined the debris before ingesting it.

  I stepped toward Gareth. He continued to shove fistfuls of refuse into his mouth. From close up, I could see that he was cleaner than I’d expected. Except for some smears of grease and ketchup around the cuffs and on the front, the purple parka looked new and expensive. He wore neither earmuffs nor a hat. His wavy dark hair wasn’t matted or dull, and he’d had a recent haircut. If he’d been strolling down the street instead of raiding the trash with the appetite of a starving dog, he’d have been easy to mistake for a hiker at the end of a long trek. All that gave him away was the twisted quality of that ravenous greed. When parents refer to teenage sons as “human garbage disposals,” they are only kidding. Twice a day in my own kitchen, I witness raw animal appetite. I joke about it. Turned loose on that trash barrel, Rowdy and Kimi would have fought over the greasy rubbish. If Gareth had paused, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lift his leg on the barrel, or raise a foot and try to scratch an ear. I also had no doubt that if I reached in to snatch a french fry, he’d bite my wrist.

  Knowing no other way to approach Gareth, I returned to Bartley’s and ordered a cheeseburger with fries to go. As I waited for the food, the sight of ordinary people chewing food turned my stomach. Never again, I resolved, would I laugh at Rita for eating pizza with a knife and fork. From now on, I’d do the same myself.

  Back outside, I had to remind myself that in buying sustenance for a homeless man, I was doing nothing wrong. I tried to think that I was offering him the dignity of eating his very own food instead of jettisoned burgers and fries that bore other people’s tooth marks and saliva. What rattled me was the familiarity of my own behavior. I train my dogs with food. I had a horrible sense of treating Gareth as other than human.

  By now, he was standing upright. I got my first look at his face. For no good reason, I had envisioned him in the image of his father’s graduation picture. In fact, he looked vaguely like Claudia. His expression, though, was weirdly passive and puzzled. Gareth had the vacant look of a man who’s spent a long time waiting for an event that has never materialized—not the coming of Godot, either, but the arrival of a nameless something. He now stood a few feet from the trash barrel with his arms hanging limply at his sides and his feet spread. He wore new high-top running shoes. His face was clean: He must have wiped his mouth on something—his sleeve, perhaps, or someone else’s discarded paper napkin. His cheeks showed only a few days’ growth of beard. There was, I thought, a sort of lost sweetness about Gareth.

  I thrust the paper bag of cheeseburger and fries toward him. “Gareth,” I said, “my name is Holly. I brought you some lunch.”

  For obvious reasons, I expected him to tear open the bag and shove the food down his throat. But as he stared at the bag in his hands, his expression was mystified. His fingers trembled.

  “It’s a cheeseburger,” I said, “with fries.”

  I should have expected the clear, educated voice. After all, he’d gone to Avon Hill. “Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’ll save it for later.”

  “It’ll get cold,” I remarked.

  “I don’t mind. And I’ve just eaten.” He could’ve been referring to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. Fixing pale, innocent blue eyes on mine, he said rather intently, “They don’t feed me at home. They threw me out on the street.” Pointing to the backpack, he added, “I was forced to take the essentials with me.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oscar Fisch blames me for the rats, you see,” Gareth confided. “They’re everywhere in the house these days. One can’t avoid them. They scurry around in the walls. It’s dangerous. They gnaw at the electric wires. Their teeth are sharp.”

  “It’s amazing they don’t electrocute themselves.” I felt as if Lewis Carroll had written the line for me.

  “Oh, but they do!” His voice dropped to a whisper. “The decay is everywhere. They die in the walls. The stench fills every room.” Glancing nervously left and right, he continued in an undertone, “Oscar Fisch knows they’re there. He won’t admit it. So does my mother. But she lets men take advantage of her.” After a pause, he said at normal volume and in a cheerfully matter-of-fact tone, “And rats, too.”

  “Rats,” I echoed.

  Gareth looked slightly alarmed. “You haven’t come about the rats, have you?”

  “Certainly not. I brought you lunch. Remember?”

  Exact
ly as he’d done before, he said, “Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’ll save it for later.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I assured him.

  For a moment, his face went blank. Then his eyes brightened, as if he’d remembered something. “Uncle George bought rat poison,” he informed me.